8 Time Saving eBay Apps for Mac

eBay has become completely ubiquitous with buying and selling goods online, but their website often doesn’t provide the best user experience. For ‘power users’ of eBay, there are a number of apps available for OSX which can help you to get the most from the auction site and save a huge amount of time. Even for casual users, certain tools can make searching, saving results and tracking auctions far easier.

This roundup will focus on 8 different applications which have the potential to make you a much more effective eBay user. Whether it’s through creating great looking auctions, or ensuring you have the best chance of winning in a bidding contest – you’ll see eBay in a completely fresh light.

Created by eBay themselves, this is the first port of call for a desktop browsing application. It offers a much more pleasing interface that the web version, and all the basic functionality of buying and selling through eBay. It runs through Adobe Air to allow multi-platform support.

One of the most famous eBay listing tools, GarageSale comes with a whole range of advanced features such as well designed themes and listing scheduling. It’s great for those who regularly sell on eBay and even offers free image hosting.

iSale is another well known app, with the latest version pushing integration of video in your listings. A free companion iPhone application is available, and many well designed themes are included to ensure your listings look professional. Thorough scheduling, reporting and automation features are included, but it’s the most pricey app in our roundup.

GarageBuy focuses on improving the eBay browsing experience, making searching for and saving items much easier. It’s officially endorsed by eBay themselves, and a nice touch is the integration with Growl for notifying you about bids and listing changes.

This is another bidding tool, which features ‘sniping’ features to let you bid for an item at the last minute automatically. Searching and saving items is easy, and the app has good support for multiple eBay accounts. It’s not cheap, however, and a combination of GarageBuy and JBidwatcher (below) may offer better value.

eBay Addict is an OS X Dashboard widget which can track the eBay items you’re interested in (after you enter the item ID into the widget). It displays the title, the current price, and the time remaining in the auction. Item status is updated automatically every minute.

Another Dashboard widget, eBay Watcher is more full featured, allowing you to view individual listings, your My eBay tracked items and also perform basic searches. It even has in-built bidding support, and a host of settings and preferences. Not bad for a widget!

This is a Java-based application allowing you to monitor auctions, submit bids, snipe (including ‘multi snipes’), and otherwise track your eBay experience. The interface leaves quite a bit to be desired, but on the whole it’s a decent free tool.

Conclusion

eBay is a great shopping system, and these applications can help to bring bidding and listing items a little closer to home. Local software provides a number of advantages – great looking themes, automated listings, improved reporting and integration with apps such as Growl.

Some of the better polished tools do require you to fork over a few dollars, but a range of free versions also do the trick (albeit not with quite the same style). I’m sure I’ve missed a few apps which you use in conjunction with eBay, so feel free to leave any further suggestions in the comments!

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Responses

Hmmm, I’m liking the look of GarageBuy since I have been trying to save money lately so I can travel some more. In that regard eBay is kind of my savior although maybe it makes it too easy to buy things :P

Nevertheless, I’ll definitely check some of these apps out. Might be able to pawn off some of my old junk.

Sebastian

February 26th

I’ll have to check these out. And I must agree– eBay needs to update their look/feel!

I use GarageSale a lot and can’t recommend it enough for anyone that sells regularly on eBay. It’s a big time saver and offers a rather nifty way around paying to upload multiple images by hosting them yourself. Buy it, it will pay for itself in no time.

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